Traditionally, utility meters such as water, gas, and electric are located on or near the residential or commercial building using the utility service. The meters are frequently monitored by employees of the utility companies that travel from building-to-building or home-to-home, logging or confirming the meter values for billing purposes. This manual approach to reviewing the utility meters is time consuming, costly, and labor intensive.
The utility meters described above typically comprise a series of dials and/or numerical values. To the owners of the establishments, such dials and numbers offer no assistance in discerning ones real time utility costs or costs over a given period of time (running costs). Generally, real time utility costs or running costs can be calculated if a difference is known between the meter start value and current value and this difference is multiplied by the utility rate at the present time or over the period of time to be calculated. Accordingly, it should be appreciated that conventional utility meters do not provide a user-friendly method to the owners of the establishment to calculate their consumption costs and often have to rely on the utility companies' monthly invoice or bill.